5 Indian Designers Willing To Dress Up Your Kids

Text by Tanisha Choudhury

We speak to Aneeth Arora, Payal Singhal, Ritu Beri and more about designing childrenswear in India

India’s womenswear fashion segment is seeing a constant growth, but a few years ago saw the rise of designer kidswear. Pregnancy style is a real thing and so is the rise in the cult of celebrity kids — from Blue Ivy Carter to North West Kardashian. As new mothers become more style conscious, why should their toddlers be left behind?

You can find a number of Indian designers’ collections on Kidology — Gauri and Nainika, Gaurav Gupta and Siddhartha Tytler are on their current roster. A few labels like Eka by Rina Singh design kidswear sporadically and a few others like Raghavendra Rathore provide bespoke services for your dashing little man.

We spoke to leading Indian designers and entrepreneurs who ventured into childrenswear (and manufacture their own lines) about their collections and the challenges in designing for kids.

Chota Péro

Designer: Aneeth Arora

Age group – 6 months to 16 years old

Style quotient: The Chota Péro line for children has the signature delicacy and whimsy of its parent line, Péro. Also, like the main line, it has handmade garments, created using Péro’s own textiles and crafted by Indian artisans. “Our clothing is mostly day wear and not really occasion wear. It’s up to the mothers on how to make the kids wear those dresses, and make it fit in at a party, or on the beach.”

Where to get it: You can contact them on perobyaneetharora@gmail.com. They can also be found at various exhibitions in India and abroad.

Why kidswear: “There were a lot of people who were buying Péro from us because they liked the fabric, the hand-stitch of the garment and they started asking us if we did kidswear as well. It was mainly through their feedback saying it would be good to have kidswear in our soft fabrics that we started doing Chota Péro.

Designing for children: “There isn’t too much of a difference from our main line, except for the cuts that we made for children. In terms of comfort and wearability, it was very much what we do for womenswear.

Trendy childrenswear in India: “Our market is mostly overseas. I haven’t seen much of a growth in the Indian market from the time we started doing kidswear. In India, people don’t want to spend as much because they know that the kid is going to outgrow the dress very soon — brands like United Colors of Benetton and Gini & Jony do better, because people know that it’s not expensive. But overseas if they spend on a brand like Péro, where they know there is attention to detail, they treat it as an heirloom. They value the product, in the sense that they see the hard work that has gone into it. I feel that the Indian buyer is yet to mature in terms of kids clothing.”